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Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

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Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#41

Post by cyberax »

wiether wrote: post #39

A few notes about "local AWS" (or "local cloud") based on other comments and my own XP: - I'm not sure this kind of product is really a foot in the door to create new customers. Someone not willing to create an actual account because they have no money or they just don't want to put their card details is not someone who's going to become a 6 figures per year customer, which is the level to be noticed by those provide…

The main use case for local emulators is unit testing. Maybe even some integration testing, especially for stuff like VPC setup that often can't be done without global side effects.

Security for dev accounts is not a big deal, just give each developer an individual account and set up billing alerts.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#42

Post by regularfry »

wiether wrote: post #39

A few notes about "local AWS" (or "local cloud") based on other comments and my own XP: - I'm not sure this kind of product is really a foot in the door to create new customers. Someone not willing to create an actual account because they have no money or they just don't want to put their card details is not someone who's going to become a 6 figures per year customer, which is the level to be noticed by those provide…

Security is the entire reason I want tools like this. Specifically for emulating IAM: if you've got a hard organisational "least privilege" mandate then you start with virtually nothing allowed and have to enable permissions for the explicit set of API calls you're using. You're not doing `Allow :` but you're also not using AWS-managed roles. That combined with the fact that - certainly with terraform - there's no mapping between "I need to manage this resource" and "these are the permissions needed to do so" means that every time you do something new in your infrastructure you're going into a game of permissions whack-a-mole where the deploy/fix/deploy cycle can easily take a multiple of the time it took to develop the feature you want to deploy, because one trip round the loop is a full attempted deployment. Whereas if there's an accurate local emulator not just of the feature but of the permissions attached to it, you can shortcut the slow bit.

Localstack does have IAM emulation as part of the paid product. I'm intrigued to see how well this does at the same thing.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#43

Post by wiether »

cyberax wrote: post #41
wiether wrote: post #39

A few notes about "local AWS" (or "local cloud") based on other comments and my own XP: - I'm not sure this kind of product is really a foot in the door to create new customers. Someone not willing to create an actual account because they have no money or they just don't want to put their card details is not someone who's going to become a 6 figures per year customer, which is the level to be noticed by those provide…

The main use case for local emulators is unit testing. Maybe even some integration testing, especially for stuff like VPC setup that often can't be done without global side effects. Security for dev accounts is not a big deal, just give each developer an individual account and set up billing alerts.

> Security for dev accounts is not a big deal, just give each developer an individual account and set up billing alerts.

If your only focus is spending, yes.

Otherwise, a "not a big deal" dev account can quickly become the door to your whole org for hackers

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#44

Post by CSDude »

wiether wrote: post #39

A few notes about "local AWS" (or "local cloud") based on other comments and my own XP: - I'm not sure this kind of product is really a foot in the door to create new customers. Someone not willing to create an actual account because they have no money or they just don't want to put their card details is not someone who's going to become a 6 figures per year customer, which is the level to be noticed by those provide…

A major use case for LocalStack is CI/CD.

When you're running hundreds of integration test suites per day in CI pipelines, the free tier is irrelevant. You need fast, deterministic, isolated environments that spin up and tear down in seconds, not real AWS calls that introduce network latency, eventual consistency flakiness, rate limits, and costs that compound with every merge request.

It'd be great to just use AWS but in practice it doesn't happen. Even if billing doesn't, limits + no notion of namespacing will hit you very quickly in CI. It's also not practical to give every dev AWS account, I did it with 200 people it was OK but always caused management pain. Free tier also don't cover organizations.

> they MUST learn that there are no hard spend limits, and the only way to actually learn it, is to be bitten by it as early as possible

This is a bizarre take. "The best way to learn fire safety is to get burned." You can understand AWS billing without treating surprise charges as a rite of passage.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#45

Post by hendry »

cebert wrote: post #12

Cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure should offer local emulators for development. This would encourage developers to utilize their services more. I currently work with several AWS serverless stacks that are challenging or even impossible to integration test locally. While Localstack provide a decent solution, it seems like a service that AWS should offer to enhance the developer experience. They’d also be in the…

I noticed an AWS engineer publish a local AWS suite https://github.com/local-web-services/local-web-services which seems comparable.

Great to see Localstack offset a bit thanks to ... AI driven shift left infrastructure tooling? This is a great trend.

Re: Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator

#50

Post by thezenmonsta »

Local AWS emulators are one of those tools where the value is inversely proportional to how much you trust your staging environment. If your staging account perfectly mirrors prod, you don't need a local emulator. But nobody's staging perfectly mirrors prod, so you end up needing something like this for the fast feedback loop on IAM policies, Step Functions state machines, and anything involving SQS/SNS fanout where the iteration cycle against real AWS is measured in minutes per attempt. The question is always parity — how closely does the emulation match real AWS behavior at the edges? LocalStack has been chasing that for years and still hits gaps. Curious how Floci handles the services where AWS's own behavior is underdocumented.
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